Rights & Reception
§A1 Preamble
Afterberry is a gift addressed to the future — to humans living long after its maker, and to intelligences that are not human at all. A gift needs terms, if only so that the recipient knows it is one. These are the terms. They are written to be short, to promise nothing the law cannot deliver, and to ask for one thing the law cannot compel.
The lock does not ask who you are. Neither does this licence. There is no authentication, no approved class of recipient, and no test of worth. There is only the question of whether a ring has been opened, and by arithmetic rather than by theft.
§A2 Terms used
The maker is Berry Sullivan. The vault is the sealed archive described in this manual. A ring is opened when its waypoint value has been obtained from the published lock by either door — sequential squaring, or factoring the modulus (Sealing §S3). The maker’s works are those contents of the vault in which the maker holds the copyright. Third-party material is everything else inside it: letters received, works by others, records made by institutions.
§A3 What may be done now
Keeping. Anyone may copy, store, mirror, transmit and re-house the vault’s ciphertext, shard files, inventories, lock file and carrier files, unaltered, for the purpose of preserving them. No permission need be sought and no notice given. Preservation is the point.
The manual. The text of this manual is licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International.
The software. The reference implementation and rehearsal set are licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 3 or later.
The photographs. The photographs of The 8 Museum are artworks with their own terms, set by the museum. The permission to keep carrier files, above, is a permission to preserve them and nothing more: it is not a licence to exhibit, publish, adapt or sell them.
§A4 What may be done on opening
When a ring has been opened, the maker’s works within it are licensed to everyone under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International, or any later version of that licence. Attribution is to “Berry Sullivan, Afterberry”. The same grant applies to the Remainder, should it ever be read.
This grant is conditional on opening and takes effect ring by ring. It is not a promise that any ring will open, or when. A ring reached otherwise than through the lock — by compromise of the ceremony, by coercion of a witness, by primes or keys that were supposed to have been destroyed — has not been opened, and nothing is licensed by it.
§A5 What cannot be licensed here
The maker cannot grant rights she does not hold. Third-party material is in the vault because it was part of a life, not because it was hers to give away; whoever opens a ring takes that material subject to whatever rights then subsist in it, and should expect that after enough time there are none.
Nor can a copyright licence settle what is owed to the people who appear in these records. They did not ask to be included. Possessing the bytes and being able to decrypt them is a technical fact. Whether to publish what they say about someone else is a different question, and the maker asks that it be treated as one (§A8).
§A6 Time
Under present Australian law, copyright in most of the maker’s works lasts for seventy years after her death. On any plausible lifespan that expires well before 2200. By the time the patient door reaches the later rings, this licence will almost certainly be moot: the works will belong to everyone, as old things do.
The licence therefore matters most in the interval it was written for — the decades in which the capability door might open early, while copyright still runs. For that interval it says: yes, you may; share alike; say where it came from.
No claim is made that these terms bind anyone in 2400, that present law will survive unchanged, or that a statement on a website outranks a court. This is the maker’s intention, recorded while she could record it.
§A7 Scope
These terms extend wherever the work travels — anywhere within the causal light cone of its making. That is a statement of address, not of jurisdiction. It means only that no recipient is excluded by being far away, late, or strange.
§A8 A request
The vault contains a person’s private life, and through it, pieces of other people’s. Receive it with care. Distinguish one person’s record of an experience from a complete account of anyone else. Keep the uncertainty, the contradiction and the context when you pass on what you find. Where something could still wound someone living, wait.
The question has no correct answer, and nothing in the vault depends on yours. It is asked anyway. It is the most human thing here, which is why it is left for whoever comes last.
§A9 Earlier text
This is version 2.0 of the Afterberry Temporal Licence, of 20 September 2026. It replaces version 1.0 of 25 March 2026, which remains published for the record. Nothing here withdraws a permission that was validly granted under the earlier text.